Not being the creative type myself, I've been watching
to see what others would come up with for April Fool's Day.
(I did once fill my mother's top-most unopened teabag with instant
coffee. Very successful.) The best I've seen this year
is the 4/1/95 issue of TidBITS, forwarded to me by David Joslin.
It starts with Adam Engst saying "TidBITS,
the Best Short Electronic Newsletter with Weird Capitalization
Written Directly for the Internet. ... This issue brought to you
by Worst of the Web
and the Useless WWW Pages Hall of Fame
."

Then Tonya Engst reported on CodeSucker,
a new Mac program that can suck "features" out of other programs
and combine them to suit your needs. Grab Outline and Heading
styles from Word 5.1, envelope printing from Now Contact, and the
Transaction Register from Managing Your Money. Sucker Software
will also sell you a T-shirt that says "Code Sucks" on the front
and "Suck Code" on the back. The company believes "there's a
customer born every minute."

Geoff Duncan described Multimedia C++ 1.0,
a programming environment with a 3D videogame interface.
Function templates are anti-aliased, and the speedup due to code
optimization is shown by the rate at which your code scrolls by --
but the best feature is that you can just drag syntax errors to
your trash can. The six-player network edition includes Sega and
Nintendo game controller adapters.

Hubert "Vince" Fournier contributed a piece (from Wired?)
on Grand 'Ol Party software for Newton, which ties into GPS
for real-time tracking of the Los Angeles party and entertainment
scene. "You know, all the big celebrities have been subscribing
to this service since, like, you know, Day One," said CEO "Spaz"
Hubbard. "Now, I just say 'Hey, Newton, where's the good stuff
happening?' and it draws me a map! Is that **cool,** man, or
what?!" You can use Newton's built-in address book if you need
to bum a ride from a friend -- but "GOP tells you whether you
**want** to go to a party or not, which is totally important."
Four stars indicates Hollywood royalty, "but, like, half a star
probably means Kato Kaelin's there."

The really neat product, though, was Tonya Engst's proposed
SimWord. This may have been inspired by Dave Winer's recent
suggestion that word processors include a SimCity-style disaster
menu. (KidPix comes close, with its dynamite screen eraser.
The very successful Keroppi Dayhopper also offers a word processor
with a good graphic interface for kids -- but no disasters.)
Anyway, a SimWord user would choose a basic genre and set up
sections "zoned" as Introduction, Acknowledgement, Text,
Additional Reading, References, and so on. You then bring words
into the zones, but the words will leave if they're uncomfortable.
You have to provide well-thought out titles and carefully crafted
sentences if you want them to stay. Erecting stadiums in the
zones improves quality of life and makes words more likely to
stick around. "Once words start moving into your zones, you can
go have a cup of coffee and find your work nearly done when you
return." If you need to move material between distant sections,
build airports or use a Trek-style cross-reference transporter.
You can select disasters for their "random human element,"
such as a George Will quotation storm, or you can just set the
zone parameters for special effects. Ignore quality of life,
for instance, and you may get 500 pages of turgid conversation
interspersed with Russian names, in the style of Dostoevsky.
Or pay a Zone Commissioner too little and you'll get a black
market, with words trading their letters to each other.
Successful traders may become so long and powerful that
they can create criminal zones, where stray words are killed
and stripped of their vowels.

To which Adam Engst added "This week brings you some irrelevant
articles about topics you probably don't give a damn about.
In fact, just pack it up and don't read this issue. Go outside,
get some sun, and have a life, okay?" Or you can read the whole
thing from
or .